Peter Augustine Lawler was a political philosopher and professor of government at Berry College in Georgia, known for his wide-ranging writings on human nature, modernity, and the humanities. He contributed essays and reviews to The Weekly Standard from 1996 to 2016, exploring topics such as the future of human nature, marriage, and the legacy of great political figures like de Gaulle. Lawler, who passed away in 2017, was also a longtime member of the President's Council on Bioethics and a prolific author and public intellectual.
Well, this has been a most unexpected primary/caucus season. More than 45 percent of the voters are for either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. For many friends of liberty, this means about half the country has embraced one of the two worst presidential candidates in American history. They’ve chosen…
Richard V. Reeves has written in The Atlantic a confident and illuminating account of the state of marriage in America today. College-educated American men and women “are reinventing marriage as a child-rearing machine for a post-feminist society and a knowledge economy.” On this front, the…
Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, gave by far the most thoughtful and combative commencement address this year, at Brandeis. He defended the humanities as our genuine counterculture. His defense of the humanities was intellectual—a defense of philosophers, theologians, poets,…
So I received a basically gracious note from the White House that I would no longer be a member of the President's Council on Bioethics at the end of the next business day.
Shelby Foote
Natural Rights and the Right to Choose by Hadley Arkes Cambridge Univ. Press, 288 pp., $28 HADLEY ARKES is a frustrated man. All he wants to do is to get his fellow citizens to talk with him seriously on the fundamental moral and political issue of our time: abortion. And he has been tireless in…
HUMAN NATURE--the very idea of a human nature--has been under assault for centuries. That philosophical, historical, and anthropological attack is now fading, and end-of-history theorists, followed by sociobiologists, have come riding to human nature's defense. But they are curious defenders.…
NO biographer or historian has yet quite captured the greatness of Charles de Gaulle. Daniel J. Mahoney's De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Modern Democracy (Praeger, 188 pages, $ 45) takes a new approach. It is an extraordinarily penetrating and original study of de Gaulle as political…
NO biographer or historian has yet quite captured the greatness of Charles de Gaulle. Daniel J. Mahoney's De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Modern Democracy (Praeger, 188 pages, $ 45) takes a new approach. It is an extraordinarily penetrating and original study of de Gaulle as political…